I have been so out of the loop on PCs for a few years now and I am hoping someone can fill in some info for me! I am currently buying a new computer, I already picked up an EVGA 680 GTX video card and need to know which motherboard/cpu won't bottleneck it. i5 or i7 cpu? I don't know the difference or if there is a big difference between the two.

I am going to buy 16gigs of RAM with a decent SSD and HDD w/ PSU & Case.

I know ASUS is a good brand and I am particular to Intel/Nvidia chipsets.

Is a Blu-ray player even worth it or should I just stick to my DVD burner for now?

I do buy through newegg.com so I will be picking up most or all items from there.

I will make this easier for those in the know since I can do all the searching for deals online myself:

1) What I have zero knowledge in is sufficient case cooling, do I need to purchase anything but stock fans for the 680 GTX? Or can I just use it without extra cooling? I never overclock anything, I have no desire to and I won't be bothering with SLI. In the same boat, once I add in a SSD/HDD, PSU, CD burner, Sound Card, etc. do I need more cooling than what comes with the case?

2) Is there anything I need to watch out for in choosing a motherboard, cpu, memory? I always fear of choosing components and mistakenly purchasing a MB that won't work right with the other hardware.

3) Is the i7 cpu a better option than the i5 for gaming and photoshop (which is what I will mostly use the pc for)?

1. Schwa? You won't buy a fan for the GPU, only the CPU. Are you going to play games for hours on end? Probably good to buy a better fan then.

2. Yeah, CPU and memory need to be correllated. Triple clock CPU needs triple clock memory paired in three, for instance. Also, you need to buy all your memory as a single paired unit at once, not three separate not designed to go together.

Buy a name-brand, good motherboard. Asus or Gigabyte.

3. I hear the i7 is amazing, but haven't done research lately.

__________________Choose your government: the majority ruling the minority, the minority ruling the majority, or everyone ruling themselves long as they do not initiate force, fraud, or theft against one another.

I have heard of liquid cooling for video cards as an example .. er may have been for casing. I can't remember. I just know that some people go way out of their way to deep freeze their uber systems =p I wasn't sure if I needed more cooling for buying a top of the line card.

I generally don't play games for hours on end anymore after I finally cut the cord to WoW. I will be playing a lot of Diablo 3 though. I don't see D3 being to hard on the video card, heh. My gaming sessions last anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours on average, will be more with D3 but not by much and not everyday.

Power supply is an issue. I'd go for a 750 or 800 for the average power-system.

__________________Choose your government: the majority ruling the minority, the minority ruling the majority, or everyone ruling themselves long as they do not initiate force, fraud, or theft against one another.

Case wise, i know you want a 680 and a core i5, so you're going to need a decent sized case. Any style preferences that you can think of?

See that's the thing, I have no idea about cases. What I can tell you is that I couldn't care less about how snazzy a case looks. I don't need an expensive case from the looks alone, I just want a decent case with room for additional components if need be and decent air flow.

I just read something about Ivy Bridge is preferred for the 680 gtx... pretty much greek to me though.

Power supply is an issue. I'd go for a 750 or 800 for the average power-system.

A 750 or 800 is for a well ABOVE average system. TDP on processors, motherboards and GPUs has been dropping like crazy. I have a 650watt power supply, and I have a power hungry 140w Phenom II X4 (More power than any current non-overclocked processor), an older chipset, 5 mechanical harddrives, two DVD burners and an extra powered usb hub, i used to rock a 4870 (one of the most power hungry videocards of all time, uses more power than a GTX 680 and equal to a 7950) and 4 120mm case fans, a 200mm case fan and an oversized cooler on both my videocard and CPU. Everything ran flawlessly. (I'm now running a considerably less power hungry AMD 7850 and i traded one of the harddrives for an SSD)

Getting a stable power supply is far better than simply more watts. I highly suggest Corsair power supplies, try to get one that is 80+ GOLD certified.

Have you ever built a computer before? This is the last question before i can start giving out some case ideas. Also, total budget?

I have built before so I learn fast. The last one I built was back in 2008 so I am really rusty. I gathered the parts from an old post here and put it together from newegg. It is still running great with only the old 8800gt dying on me. Currently rocking a 9800gtx heheheh.

I am going to go with Ivy Bridge 3.4 i7-3770 with 16gig (2x8) of Corsair Vengeance 1600. I am still looking blindly at motherboards and I am also concerned with reading about the X79 Asus Z77 motherboard not being pci-e 3.0? I am just getting into the difference of 2.0 to 3.0 and brain dead.

Edit: Do all the slots need to be filled with ram or can I still just put 2 dimms in and fill the empty slots later? For budget really isn't a concern. This will be a system that will last me the next 4-5 years hopefully. Around $1800-3000ish but $800+ or so will be for a nice IPS 27" monitor.

The difference between PCI-E 3.0 and 2.0 is pretty much meaningless at the moment. Nothing really uses PCI-E 3.0 yet, the only videocards that do are the AMD 7xxx series and the GTX 680, and even they won't use all the bandwidth.

Basically, PCI-E 3.0 isnt something to worry about at the moment.

You can totally only use 2 sticks of ram, but i suggest that you use 3 sticks of ram with a core i7 because its triple channeled. I'd probably go with 12 gigs instead of 16 gigs and use 3 sticks. It'll probably cost considerably cheaper anyway and unless you do some insane rendering you won't ever notice the lost 4 gigs. I even think 12 gigs is overkill.

One last question, I can't seem to find info on using 3 dimms for the i7-3770. It says dual channel:
"Integrated Memory Controller: Supports 2 channels of DDR3‐1600 memory with 2 DIMMs per channel. Support for memory based on the Intel Extreme Memory Profile (Intel XMP) specification."

Yeah, you're right. I was thinking of more expensive i7's. The one that you're looking at is certainly only dual channel. In that case i'd use either 2x 8 gig or, honestly, i'd go for 4x 4 gig sticks. You won't need more than 16 gigs of ram and 4x 4gig sticks is probably considerably cheaper than dual 8 gig. Make sure you get 1600mhz ram.

I have 8 gig ram, wish I'd gone for more. But, i'm a bit of a power user.

__________________Choose your government: the majority ruling the minority, the minority ruling the majority, or everyone ruling themselves long as they do not initiate force, fraud, or theft against one another.

Yeah, I went x64 with the computer I am using now and I will never go back to 32. I am surprised the industry hasn't tried shifting everything toward x64 faster. What is the point of hanging onto 32 now?

Damn I need to stop going out so I don't miss great threads like this. The only 2c I can chip in by now is I'd highly suggest a 2gb video card. That's the only "real" bottleneck atm for systems and make sure it's not a 1x1 card either. 80+ Gold PSU is a must as others have mentioned and the Rosewill Lightning series is nothing short of spectacular. As for motherboards I'm going to suggest ASRock because mine has been running hassle free for me almost 6 months now which is a small miracle for mobos these days. (amd ones at least) Make sure no matter which board you purchase that you look up which ram the manufacturer suggest. ASRock takes Kingston HyperX for the most part.

edit: Oh, expect to have to overclock your ram no matter which brand you buy. Fuckers never EVERRRRRRRRRR give you 1600mhz out of the box and most BIOs's are too shy to do it for you.

__________________

Quote:

Originally Posted by AspectVoid

I had no idea he was posting awesome stuff that would get the ads cancelled.